I. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method of modelling a bill of materials for a configurable product in a managed supply chain and a modeller apparatus for modelling a bill of materials for a configurable product in a managed supply chain. The invention further relates to a computer system, a user terminal and a program storage device readable by a processing apparatus.
II. Background Information
Demand planning is used to forecast the demand for products. One object of demand planning is to plan the demand of products with respect to other product independent characteristics, for example, sales regions, customer channel and location etc. Another object of demand planning and characteristics based forecasting (CBF) is to plan the demand of complex products and their components. This is done by introducing product dependent characteristics for the complex products. An example of a complex product is a computer for which the characteristics computer memory, configuration, hard disc etc, are defined. A complex product is a product having at least one product dependent characteristic, for example, computer memory, configuration, hard disc etc.
Demand planning applications are typically provided on a computer system. Typically, they form a component or module of a supply chain management application, which runs on a computer.
Conventionally, the supply chain management application comprises a number of applications including the demand planning application and the product planning application. Demand planning involves only the planning with respect to characteristics, that is one characteristic for the complex product—or more specifically—the configurable product. A configurable product is a product, for example a personal computer (PC), of which different variants are available. Production planning, on the other hand, involves planning with respect to “real” characteristics, such as product and location.
Conventionally, in order to calculate the materials necessary to make the configurable product the bill of materials (BOM) for the configurable product is required and the BOM has to be exploded in the production planning application.
One drawback of this conventional approach is that it requires the creation and maintenance of the bill of material and its explosion in different software components. This renders the process difficult to implement and support. Further, this approach when implemented has drawbacks for the user because it is slow and provides limited information to the planner.
A further conventional approach is a technique called characteristics based forecasting (CBF), in which characteristics are used in order to describe the components on the product level. One drawback of this further conventional approach is that it does not include the modelling of the object dependencies. For example, a product may include a dependency such as “if the colour is X, then the colour is Y”. Thus, for products where the object dependencies are relevant, this approach is not suitable.
Further, the logistic chain of products between a supplier and end user of the products is compromised. In particular, the control of the supply of goods is compromised. The present invention addresses the problems of optimizing the logistic chain of products between a supplier and an end user of the products. It is a further object to improve the logistic chain with the purpose of keepings costs, including the cost of the products, down. It is a yet a further object to make the supply of products more efficient.
The problems with conventional approaches compromise the accuracy of the demand planning. Further, the accuracy, speed and ease with which the user can use the system are compromised. In particular, it is an object of the present invention to improve the speed with which the demand plan can be generated. It is a further object to improve the accuracy with which the supply of a product in the supply chain can be controlled.